Advanced command and control of live streams is a key feature in the delivery of new multimedia services into the home. Current mechanisms for command and control of Live television (TV) delivery requires in-device bulk storage, buffering, and implementation of stream command and control intelligence in the device itself. Devices which have these capabilities are for example personal video recorder (PVR) or personal computers (PC). This requirement adds considerable expense for service providers who have deployed legacy devices, for example set-top boxes for subscriber terminals (ST), which do not have such capabilities. In addition as more and more devices become network connected and these features continue as desired functionality, this will drive additional cost in those devices, for example, upgraded devices if the native capability needs to be built-in.
With a goal of enabling this functionality on new inexpensive devices as well as on legacy devices, an improved system and method for interactively delivering broadcast video from a service provider network to one or more subscriber terminals needs to be developed.
The existing prior art primarily deals with the implementation of in-device stream processing, command and control implementation internally within that device. For example, existing consumer electronic PVR implementations receive the live stream into internal buffers and command and control is provided to that device by intercepting remote control commands associated with that stream. While this implementation works for a single viewing device, one television set for example, it will not work for implementation of live command and control for other devices, i.e. multiple viewing devices, or for devices that were not designed with this native capability in mind such as many existing STs.
Therefore there is a need in the industry for developing a system and methods which would avoid the shortcomings of the prior art, and allow economies to be obtained when more than one device is to be served from a single provider network access point.